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The ghost of a beaver lives in the river near my house. I see him every day on my morning walks, his body gray and insubstantial as fog. When he walks, his darker tail drags behind him without making a sound.
When he's near, I see the spirits of trees long dead, a tangled mass of branches and trunks that grow through living trees and into each other. Today, he's at a ghost aspen on the shore. Perched on his hind legs with his hands pressed against the gray bark, he gnaws at the tree and carves an arc like a quartered moon. Silver wood shavings fall around him, melting away like snow.
The inside of a ghost tree is lighter than the outer bark, and it glows with a pale light like the moon. He'll fell this tree, gnaw off branches, and guide them down to the river to add them to his dam. The dam he's working on is a mound of spectral branches and logs, held together with an ectoplasmic gray mud. Rising imposingly over the water, it crosses from one shore to the other, the largest dam I've ever seen, but still the river flows on.